


Home

by Huggle



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Apocalypse, Broken Castiel, Castiel Has Self-Worth Issues, Castiel and Mental Health Issues, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Grieving Castiel, Guilty Castiel, Heartbroken Castiel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-12
Updated: 2017-02-12
Packaged: 2018-09-23 18:43:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9671273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Huggle/pseuds/Huggle
Summary: Castiel made Dean a promise.  Keeping it becomes impossible.  But Dean never gives up on his family.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote MCD. I was down last night and this was the result but that isn't the central thing here. I guess the core of this story is family and I sniffled while writing it, but I swear to you there's a happy ending, and I hope the road there doesn't hurt too much.

After it’s over, Cas doesn’t return to the bunker. He knows that he should. For strategic reasons, if nothing else. The headquarters of the American Men of Letters is a valuable resource in terms of lore, but nothing in Heaven, Hell or on Earth could ever persuade him to enter that place again.

And since he has the only remaining key, he doubts anyone else will either.

But he has to go somewhere. To recuperate, to…to work out what he is going to do now.

In the end, he remembers the cabin. It is hardly a source of pleasant memories – unfortunately, he recalls everything of the time he was insane, broken by the torment of Sam’s own madness – but as far as he knows only a few people were even aware of its existence.

Other than him they are all dead now, so it will be the safest place on Earth. 

Once darkness falls, he breaks into a car and hotwires it, then starts the long drive north.

**

The roads are quiet for the most part. He makes better time than expected, fortunate that the car he chose had a full tank and helped him avoid trying to find an open gas station. It will be some time before things return to normal; he listens to emergency broadcasts, repetitive instructions for people to remain in their homes so the authorities can gradually restore order.

Once he passes a police car, and watches it warily in case they pursue him and he has to outrun them. But the car never moves and Cas realises it likely won’t again. He sees a few vehicles like that on his journey, some with the car doors open and some with their occupants frozen nearby in the pained rictus of death.

How many succumbed, he wonders. Enough to shake this world to its core, to cause insurmountable pain and grief. He has never been a stranger to it. He has always known loss. But these past few weeks, he has never felt it so deeply – like a dull blade carving into him, twisting as it digs its way deeper inside.

In the end he turns the radio off and drives the rest of the way in silence.

**

When he reaches the cabin, he’s gratified to find it standing undisturbed. He can still gauge time, and it’s clear no one has been here since the day they left for the final battle against the Leviathan. Part of him feared he would find survivors here – driven by terror out of the cities and taking up residence in the first safe place they found.

But the cabin is too out of the way, too remote for that, he reasons. Hunter foresight. 

All the same, he pushes a chair under the door handle to discourage any human intruders, and pours salt around the doors and windows to deal with anything else. His Grace needs to replenish itself, and warding the building will only slow that process down.

Though he knows sleep is ill advised, with no one to stand watch for him as he had done countless times for others, he can’t help himself. His body is overtaken by a pervasive weariness that he can’t account for. He’s as close to being an angel again as he ever will be, yet he aches and trembles and his wounds do not seem to heal as they should.

In the end, he lacks the energy to fight it, and lies down on the bed, intending to close his eyes only for a few moments.

Instead, he sleeps until the sun rises and the brightness of the cabin awakens him.

Though he’s rested for seven hours, he feels no better. He might even feel worse.

**

They were given some advance warning by Toni, of all people. When she fled to them, she was bleeding and frantic. Her son was in her arms, and she was as panicked as they had ever seen her. She babbled at them for several minutes, desperate but making little sense, until Cas took the boy from her and felt the sickness raging in him.

His first instinct was to heal, but his Grace was repelled just like it was every time he tried that night.

The boy was dead by morning. After that, Toni was eerily calm, and explained quietly that they had made a very bad mistake.

One which many people would end up paying for. And no, there was no way to stop it.

They listened, in growing alarm, and though they wanted to disbelieve her the dead body of her son seemed proof enough.

So did her suicide less than thirty minutes later, by way of the spare gun Dean kept strapped to the underside of the library table. Her soul was gone before Cas could act, but Sam gently pulled him away anyway. 

“We should make plans,” he said. 

And so they had. For all the good it had done them.

**

He has no need of food or water, at least. That said, there’s a garden behind the cabin – since it hasn’t been tended in some years, it’s wild and overgrown, but Cas sees no reason he can’t deal with that. He might anyway, because there’s little else to fill his days at present.

The cabin’s in a poor state of repair, but again the cold draughts and the creaking floorboards make little difference to him. Certainly he should look to boarding up the windows, for security if nothing else. For something to do.

He might as well start. So he begins to work on it, tidying at first, clearing the clutter so he can see what needs to be done and what he has to work with. It’s a slow but steady distraction and he welcomes it because all else he has to do is think and all he has to think of is what he’s lost. And how he couldn’t do anything to prevent it.

By the end of the first day, he’s stacked anything broken or of no use in a heap in the corner. From among that he can use some things to fix the windows and the rest he can put outside, or even just leave where it is.

It makes no real difference. No one will see the inside of this place but him.

Tomorrow, he decides, he’ll begin on repairs.

**

Cas had taken the bodies of the boy and his mother outside and burned them. He’d made the Winchesters take shelter in the furthest room from anywhere either of them had been. From any surface they’d touched.

Then he had purged every square inch of those places with his Grace. And then, mindful of how useless his attempt at healing the boy had been, he’d taken the bottle of bleach from under the sink and scrubbed down everything he could think of.

It made no difference in the end, but he hadn’t known that at the time. He wondered if Mary and the boys had, and if he himself had simply been in denial.

Regardless they had gone together into town and bought up as much supplies as they could, and told him to call Claire and have her, Jody and Alex, leave immediately for the bunker.

There was still a chance, Mary had insisted, that this was just the talk of a frightened woman. Whose son had been afflicted by something. It didn’t mean the end was looming over all of them.

Everything they were doing, it was just precautionary. 

It was also something humans did, Cas had noticed, when they were out of options and knew it. They kept going as if they still had a chance, just in case they might.

Unfortunately, it just hadn’t been so.

**

He finds a hammer and nails downstairs in an old tool kit and uses some of the broken pieces of wood to cover up the cracked or damaged windows. By the time he’s done, the cabin looks murky and unwelcoming. But he supposes he’ll get used to that. 

He has little need of comfort. 

That fills a morning, and he ends up going out back to see what needs to be done to the garden. Too much, he decides, and retreats inside behind a locked door and renewed salt lines to wait for night and sleep he’s grateful for because at least it is better than sitting awake in the silence.

**

Mary went first, and fastest. Her symptoms were sudden, and the decline brutally short. There was no blessing in that, even so. Sam and Dean were inconsolable, though they pushed through anyway – focusing their pain and grief on the matter of survival. They had lived through her loss before – though over in one night, it had cast a shadow over their lives that had never lifted, and Cas had no power at his command to help then or now.

Just as he could do nothing when Jody called to say they wouldn’t be coming. She sounded sick with pain and misery and Cas wanted to ask after Claire but he knew the answer already and felt his own heart break.

Whatever the British Men of Letters had brought on them, it was far from over. 

And it took Sam next.

**

“C’mon, Cas. Rise and shine, angel.”

Cas sits up as soon as he hears the voice, even though he knows it’s impossible. But all the same, there Dean is, sitting at the edge of the bed and grinning at him.

“Dean.” He watches his hunter nod, then stand up.

“You’re sleeping now, huh. Eating?”

Cas pushes aside blankets he doesn’t remember covering himself with and gets out of the bed. “No. Just… I needed the rest. And there isn’t much else to do.”

“Guess not.” Dean walks slowly around the room, nodding to himself. “Like what you’ve done with the place.” He looks expectantly at Cas. 

Cas stares back, still wrong footed. Dean can’t be here. He can’t.

“It’s a joke, Cas. I mean, I know you’re trying but… why didn’t you go back to the bunker?”

Why? Cas finds himself speechless for a moment. “What was left for me there, Dean?” he manages, finally. “An empty building. A place that I once called home.”

Home, because he shared it with his family. He’s surprised Dean doesn’t understand that.

“This can’t be better,” Dean protests. “C’mon, Cas. You’d be safer back there. This… This place is a foxhole, man. You can’t stay here.”

If not here, Cas thinks, then where? “It doesn’t matter where I go, Dean. I’ll be alone, regardless.”

“Then better there than here. Get back in that car, Cas. Go home.”

To what? A bunker empty of everything but memories? All of them tainted to him now? 

“It’s not home to me now, Dean.” He glances around the room. This, of course, isn’t either. Home is… 

He looks back but Dean’s gone. 

**

Dean never gave up. Not even after they had to burn Sam and Mary’s bodies. Cas had never been so proud of him but even so he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold on indefinitely. He walked like a hollow man, and all Cas could do was follow on behind.

They knew the headquarters the British Men of Letters had set up to operate from in the US, and while that fact that they held that knowledge was probably not a secret from their enemies, Cas hadn’t expected them to be able to just walk in.

Nonetheless, they did so. The entrance to the sprawling old house was unguarded, and no one came to challenge them as they pushed inwards.

They found their first body a minute later, contorted at the foot of the stairs. Cas wanted to take Dean away – this place was obviously contaminated – but Dean refused. The answer might be here. A cure. Something.

All they found were more bodies, and by the time they left Dean was coughing constantly.

Cas drove them back to the bunker, but barely half way there Dean pleaded with him to pull over.

He lay wheezing in Cas’s arms, the angel doing his best to push down the pain he knew Dean was in. And through it, Dean demanded he live. He find some way to go on, to find a life in whatever was left of the world. 

After he was gone, Cas held him for what felt like hours but eventually he knew what he had to do.

He used the Impala as Dean’s pyre and watched until it burned itself out.

**

He considers putting the photo he’d taken from Dean’s pocket somewhere he can gaze at it as he wanders around the cabin. It’s the photo Bobby took, of all of them, the night before they went to face Lucifer. He doesn’t think Dean would have minded him taking it, doesn’t think Dean would grudge him this, when he has nothing else left of them.

But in the end he keeps it in his coat pocket, too fearful to put it down anywhere in case he misplaces it or has to leave again suddenly.

That isn’t likely to happen. He can’t think of anything that would drive him out of here, except perhaps other people. It’s possible some survivors might come, and might want the cabin, and in truth Cas knows he would surrender it if it came to that. Then he would have nowhere, but what does it matter? 

He has nowhere right now, because no matter where he goes it will simply be a building. Four walls and a ceiling. That’s all.

It’s only hours later, as dusk falls, that he realises he’s spent the day walking circles around the cabin, and doing nothing else.

Most likely when Dean demanded he live, this was not what he had in mind.

But then Dean should have lived too, if he wanted to make sure.

**

He isn’t surprised when Dean wakes him in the night. He looks angry, serious. Cas has seen him like that before. Often. It’s Dean’s way. When he’s worried. When he’s afraid. When, as Cas has often heard from him, ‘you’ve fucked up’. 

“Cas, I mean it, you can’t stay here.”

Cas turns onto his side, away from him. Is this some kind of hellish torment, he wonders. To show him what he had, to remind him that though he tried to hold onto his family he let them slip through his fingers? He’d always known the peril of loving humans was their inevitable deaths. But while he still had a place in Heaven, he’d reasoned they would not be separated. Then he had been barred entry, and the awareness that he would never see them again when they died hit him hard.

He'd worked at preparing himself for that, but it had never occurred to him that Dean might haunt him.

How could Dean not know the pain he was inflicting by doing so?

“Please,” he says. “Dean, don’t do this.”

“Really?” Dean sounds furious. He grabs Cas’s shoulder, flips him onto his back. Pins him down. “Don’t do this? Don’t let you waste away in this shithole? I figured you’d be stronger than this, Cas. I figured you’d keep fighting. You told me you would.”

Had he? All he can remember about Dean’s death is the agony of it, watching as the Men of Letters’ plague ripped through him – inflicting damage at a cellular level that Cas could actually see but not stop. He thinks it unfair of Dean to try and hold him to any promises he might have made, especially those borne of a desire to provide what comfort he could.

“I’ve told you many things during our time together,” he says. “And they were not all were true.” It’s a tactic, though not inaccurate, and he knows Dean will know it, but maybe it will gain him some respite here. Make Dean back off.

It doesn’t.

“Bullshit,” Dean says. “You wanna push me away, Cas, you’ll have to do a whole lot better than that.”

Fine. Cas sits up, angry enough to push Dean back. “I’m alone now,” he says. “I tried so hard to keep you all safe, and one by one you all slipped away from me. I couldn’t save you. So I have this now, and that’s all, and it’s all I deserve. You being here – this taunting – if you’re trying to punish me for failing you, Dean, then you’re succeeding. But please, enough for today. Please.”

Dean falls silent for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is painfully low. “That’s what you think? That you failed us? That I’m here to hurt you for it?”

“Spirits are often vengeful.”

Dean smiles sadly. “And sometimes they come out of love, Cas. Come home, buddy, please.”

Cas looks around him. He can see Dean will not leave, whether his purpose is punishment or affection. And if he has to endure, then he would rather it be in familiar settings than an old wooden shack where he walks endless circuits and does so unawares.

“Alright,” he says, and gets up, goes to the door. He doesn’t remember nailing wood across it, and is surprised. Surely he would have recalled that, but there is much of the days…weeks…since he came here that are frighteningly blank to him.

Though unsealing a door is not beyond him, Dean steps forward and the nails screech as they tear free. The boards clatter to the side and the door swings inward. Cas is hesitant as he steps over the threshold. He wavers, unsure, but then Dean is behind him. He imagines he can feel his warmth.

“I’m right here, Cas. Let’s go.”

**

He has to stop and siphon gas from an abandoned car along the way, and manages to get enough to almost make it back. In the end, he has to walk the last mile, but it doesn’t matter. He knows once the bunker door seals behind him, he will never leave. Whatever awaits him in there, for good or bad, he will endure.

Dean walks with him, silent but not low; Cas can almost sense an eagerness from him.

As they climb the hill that leads to the door, Dean’s pace picks up. Cas maintains his own, but can’t fight the pain at seeing Dean so happy to be back. He was always glad to come home. He wants to be happy for him, but it’s hard to do so when Dean was robbed of his life, just like Sam and Mary. When his mother and his brother died suffering in front of him, and he couldn’t prevent it.

And, he realises, when Dean saw him lock himself away in the cabin. Another member of his family he had failed to save. Cas had always hoped to find a way to make Dean realise he did not bear responsibility for fate, but he sees now his chance is gone. And by fleeing the bunker he’s unconsciously inflicted more pain on his friend.

Well, he’s here now, and there may not be much he can do to make it up to Dean, but anything there is he’ll accomplish.

He takes the key from his pocket, and unlocks the door. Forces himself over the threshold. Closes and locks it behind him.

The lights come on automatically, and Dean makes a beeline for the steps. He pauses at the top, turns as if he expects Cas to be hesitating. Holds out his hand.

“C’mon, Cas. We took longer getting here than I thought.”

Cas isn’t sure why it matters how long they took, but he steps forward, and Dean grabs his arm. Leads him down the steps and into the library and then Cas isn’t sure he hasn’t gone mad.

Sam gets up, almost knocks his chair back in his rush. Before Cas can say anything he’s scooped up in a tight hug, and he can hear Sam’s voice, thick with tears, saying they’ve missed him.

He wonders if perhaps the nightmare of the past weeks has been just that – a nightmare. But no. This is Sam’s soul in front of him. Corporeal, with an actual physical presence. But then angels operate on a different wavelength, so…perhaps…

Dean grins as Mary taps Sam’s shoulder, easing him back. “Don’t crush the angel,” she chides, and presses a gentle kiss to Cas’s cheek.

“You didn’t leave?” He feels a chill move through him, a fear that somehow all three of them have been tied to this place and unable to ascend.

“What the hell do you think?” Dean says, but there’s a fondness in the rebuke. “When I said this was home, Cas, I meant it. We all decided. Better here with you, than upstairs without you. Pissed off a few reapers, but fuck ‘em. They should be used to it by now.”

Cas looks around at them. He’s unsure, still worried this might be some kind of trick his mind is playing on him. Or Heaven, or Hell. Or…

Dean pulls him into a hug, and Cas feels himself sag into his embrace. He’s crying before he’s aware of it, feels Sam’s hand come up to cup the back of his head. 

“Ok, Cas, it’s ok. You’re home.”


End file.
